Wednesday February 08, 2017

One of Samsung's battery factories in China just caught fire. It is confirmed that it is one of the factories that made batteries for the Note 7. Samsung says that it is a small fire but looking at the images, it seems larger. At least it was related to the waste management side of the factory and not the production side. Samsung choosing to move battery production to Japan for the S8 seems like a sound decision. After the Note 7 fiasco, they don't need more exploding battery news. I wonder how much of the $129 million investment in battery safety was spent at this factory?

The dozens of "tweets" from Weibo, with photos of thick black smoke coming out of the plant looked convincing. I also checked in with some friends in China who work in the tech industry, and they too considered the news to be legit. Still, I hesitated to post about it because I didn't want to end up writing a post about a Note 7 battery factory going up in flames without further confirmation... because the story seemed too ridiculous, too good to be true.

Well, that confirmation is here. Bloomberg reported that there was indeed a fire at "plant operated by the affiliate of Samsung Electronics in Tianjin."